Two In Harmony
by FishOfNakedness
Summary: To be a child sacrifice is her duty to the family, over and over again.
1. Fry

"Stay still now, gorgeous."

Thick fingers pressed to the thumping pulse on her wrist, pressed with slowly increasing pressure until she almost gasped past the rubber guard lodged in her mouth. She didn't of course- she kept her composure, just as he wanted her to. He grinned, a roughly hewn split across the jagged planes of his face. A show of false bright crowns, yellow down to their rotten cores- pride without reason. They were covered then, with chapped reptilian lips and the peek of his swollen, purple tongue, slippery with foul, poison drool.

Often, she likened her grandfather to a Komodo Dragon. Always stalking in the shadows, bulbous stomach rattling in time with his slow, deliberate steps until his prey stepped into range. It was then that he would chomp down with his fetid maw, vicious and unrelenting until he had his fill. Then it was back to the shadows, to watch his victim squirm and screech from a safe distance.

"Ready?"

This, she understands, is still part of the hunt. Pulling the restraints tight against her wrists, her ankles, his favourite- her neck. There are new ones at the crease of her thighs, uncomfortable and unnecessary. Made for him, for his quickening breath and clammy, scaled palms.

"We'll set it off in ten minutes."

He only calls it once he's past the safety of the double sided mirror, through the microphone that makes his domineering voice tinny and unsettling, like a circus announcement gone wrong. _This_ is the sinking of the Komodo Dragons teeth into its prey, the mind game, the terror of knowledge. Soon, electricity will surge through her body. It will burn; it will burn agonisingly through each and every nerve, her teeth will try to chatter through the rubber guard, the world will turn white and after all that the voltage will go higher, higher, higher-

Until she wakes up in the infirmary; confused, hurt, terrified. Nobody will be there at first, only the thrumming pain in her flesh and the question _why_. If she has a Persona, why doesn't it help? Why does it sit, and dawdle, and trim its nails or whatever it may be a Persona does, locked away in the mind, instead of helping her? Why does it sit through the pain of the electricity, the torture of _waiting_ for it, the laboratory simulated danger and the real one creeping into her bedroom every night? If it is a manifestation of her self, where is its sense of self-preservation?

Certainly, it must hate her. And that indeed means that she in turn, hates herself.

"Here it comes, Mitsuru."

When she awakes, there will be nothing but the steady beat of the heart monitor by her side, and the annoyance of a high pitched sound. Helium escaping a miniscule hole, whistling her to awareness, tied to the cold steel borders of her laboratory bed.

'_Happy 6__th__ Birthday!'_

Nobody will stand by her bedside, nobody will call, and nobody will write. After another month of the summer holidays pass by she will be wheeled back into the laboratory and her grandfathers coiled presence. He will pace with claws unsheathed, insanity unreined, power unbound and venom for all to see.

"Stay still now, gorgeous."


	2. Fly or Die

Note: I got pretty stuck on this for no apparent reason, possibly because I kept trying to shove pirate dad in here when he wanted to be trawling for booty or whatever it is he does during the entire game. The next chapter is hardly as grating to write as this one, though. I also changed Mitsuru's age in the previous chapter, due to the fact that her being 9 made absolutely no sense.

Grandfather fears no man in his laboratory, and any that try to disagree meet with the wrath of a truly insane man. When he finally trundles his significantly heftier bulk out of his personal wing, all but the senior scientists part before him. He snorts through his nose when he walks, and Mitsuru thinks if he really were a Komodo Dragon his fat belly would be skimming the floor by now.

He licks his lips eerily slow when he reads her records for the week- the only time he leaves his personal quarters at all. He presses his fingers firmly to the incline of her temples, and the long haired scientist always watches amorously.

"Anything yet, sir?" They never explain what they are looking for.

"Hm." He strokes her temples with clammy fingertips in a circular fashion. "Give it time, Ikutsuki."

"But if we just evoked it a few more times, we could record limitless data!" The young scientist unsettles her more than Grandfather. Grandfather is at the very least a familiar fear, but the new sidekick he has gained is like an excited puppy. He doesn't prowl the room or lurk in the corner of dark rooms, scrawling theories and incoherent ramblings about 'The Mother' on old documents. Ikutsuki delves into the most malevolent of Grandfathers research and returns unscathed, a man of unshakeable conviction.

"Have patience. We've planted the seeds, now all we have to do is keep them well fed," He taps the syringe with a bloated finger. "And wait for them to mature."

"You should be proud, Mitsu-chan." Ikutsuki smiles, though she knows it's all a routine to distract her from the familiar prick in her arm. "You beat the odds. If you had a spelling test at school, and you scored higher than ninety five children in your class, wouldn't you be happy?"

"Yes."

It's not as if high scores are a foreign concept to her, but trusting anyone beyond her Father would be self destructive. Nothing in the room can be trusted- not the benzodiazepine in her bedtime milk, not the dolls Father sends her (she can see the glint of the camera lens in their beaded eyes), and certainly not Grandfather and Ikutsuki. Each and every thing in Ergo is a disguise for something else, starch white on the surface, oozing shadows beneath. She feels the constant insecurity of fear of betrayal rattling in her bones, and the cold knowledge that it is already there. The knowledge is no comfort to her paranoid mind, but the chilling numbness of it becomes more and more alluring by the day.

"It may not have been a test of spelling, but your brain defeated every challenge we threw at it! You're the only one to pass! Of course, we haven't tested what's left of the hundred-"

Grandfather sheaths the syringe in one practiced movement.

"Shut up, Ikutsuki. This will hurt a little longer, would you like to hold my hand petite-fille?" Grandfather clutches her hand tightly before she answers, and she has long learnt that having another person in the room is no guarantee of safety. The Ergo staff are on Grandfathers side, and the only way she can fathom it is that she must be the one in the wrong. _She_ is the one that should feel the shame, though every fibre of her being denies it. Mitsuru recognises that there is no way to escape it or any of the other betrayals in the complex, and when his fingers begin the familiar slow swirling over her palm she screams at herself to freeze, to turn numb before it starts.

Something answers.

"Shit!" Grandfather swears, backing away from her bedside with one hand clutched in his other.

"I-I could have sworn…my hand, it felt as if somebody had taken my hand, and submerged it in a lake of ice!" Grandfather looks shaken, and Mitsuru takes no pleasure in his confusion. It's not as if it can be true- he's well and truly mad, after all.

"Well, it can't have been her. It's far too early for _that_." Ikutsuki chuckles nervously and fingers the stiff collar of his starch white shirt.

"…Perhaps I am not as stable as I believed, Shuji." Grandfather takes a deep breath, and when he looks at her he regards her with sluggish eyes. A komodo dragon without his poisonous bacteria, dragging his fat belly against the dirt and wobbling to and fro. It reminds her of watching Father's new exotic snakes and the empty threat they become when he milks them, fangs exposed and drained.

"Maybe you should get some sleep, Mr Kirijo."

Grandfather exhales shaky and loud, examining his hand carefully even as he reaches for his phone.

"Hello, Takeharu?"


End file.
